


Induinelmma [Our Purpose]

by Arnediad



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Consensual Smut, Gore, M/M, Other, PLEASE HEED TAGS, Violence, author personifying canonical eeyore, but cirque du screwed-up, draggin' all the hroa, just because it's written in flowers doesn't mean it's not there, like a cirque du soliel, metaphysical and physical sex, not romantic in the sense of anything healthy or survivable on a mortal scale, nsfl, takin that shake n' bake and burnin it at the unholy stake, this is disgusting and sad and somehow I worked smut into it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:55:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28917930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arnediad/pseuds/Arnediad
Summary: Sometimes he dreamed of a forest of fire.Sometimes he was dying.Sometimes he was alive.Only once did he love.
Relationships: Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor/Sauron | Mairon
Kudos: 12





	Induinelmma [Our Purpose]

He had once dreamed of a forest of fire.

Blinking up at ash-grey clouds, his hröa a ruined, pain-ridden thing spilling blood over cracked lips with battle raging around him...he could recall such a vision. It was not of fire in the sense that it was aflame; moreso that the trees had leaves so golden-yellow they seemed ignited to the eye...thrusting skyward from dusky oaken trunks to mingle with the shimmering heavens.

The ground below was rich, soft, and mossy loam...earthen in scent and sight. The light of Illuin filtered down through hallowed branches to flood the endless grove with dusky shadows that seemed to sing as much as they did glitter. On...on...on did the forest go...oer trunk and rock and fallen log…’round humming brook and wheat-heavy field.

It was beautiful, but not in the manner that one would associate things made of the Valar as beautiful. ‘Twas not a Making of Vána but something he had made...in long, long years...perhaps eons...a wildly shadowed and muffled quiet of dense thickets and rolling, golden hills...of mountains and river-swollen valleys.

In the cradle of clear...cold lakes was the glitter of mineral; of iron and gold and copper and the water was sweeter than honeymead. In the air was the falling, scattered downdraft of descending and everlasting autumn and in the deepest, most shadowed parts were crystalline gems; glowing in the inky blackness of hollow caves.

He had dreamed to Sing such a place into being...at first for himself, and then for himself and another.

**_”Mairon…”_ **

The voice echoed across the dwindling waste that was the dissolution of that particular hröa. His ëalar was intact, but at once somehow shattered and smeared across the fabric of time and space. It would take energy to put it back together, as it always did, but he could not find it within him to knit him _self_ back together underneath the pooling cesspit that was the decomposition of that which was flesh and blood and bone.

The voice was Known to him, long-known and long-cherished in the spinning stratosphere that was the vast expanse of his now-existence. Long, he had chased it, long he had both feared, abhorred, and adored it. Long he had told himself that he did not desire to have it, merely to dominate through it.

“I always thought mortals were liars.”

It didn’t come out the way he wanted it to. Really, it didn’t come out at all...became stuck in the carnage of a crushed windpipe and burst forth as a garble of rubicund and bile and slur. He did not know if he was talking to himself or the Voice; perhaps it was both. His body was dying but he was not dying...yet he felt like he must have died long ago and whatever had carried him onward was held aloft on black wings spread wide...before a monstrously bright and keening moon that had swallowed him down to the last iota and spat him out the same but somehow crippled. He thought he could see Almaren in the corners of his coalescing vision. Under a sheen of blood and the ruin of a severed retina he could see Ainulindalë and its Becoming, but it was a flickering mirage under the viscera of death. A thousand times he had died. A thousand times he had Lived.

Only once had he loved.

_**”Unto me, thou dost cleave; in spirit….in Being and Unbeing.”** _

_”Into thee I give myself to thy purpose. Betwixt the world...beneath the eyes of the One...we are Unmade and Remade.”_

Truer words, perhaps, were never spoken.

His fingers twitched even as great...seamless hands picked him up like a ragdoll and he began to shake. His eyes rolled back and the foam that coated his tongue was from lungs punctured and drowned in fluid. Ever-greater, Melkor, in his fluid nothingness. Ever greater, their purpose; in an iron-wrought creation spawned from a marching coagulate of singularity.

When he first joined their cause he was smaller than he was now...a thing of servitude. But under the watchful eye of his Master he had grown in strength and skill. At the time, it seemed only a gift, a _greater_ gift than the ability to make what he wished provided. He might not have had his forest of fire, but he had his creations...ugly and twisted into a facsimile they might be, but they served him and obeyed him and that was all he wanted at the time.

Time, of course, had a way of morphing wishes and wants into things greater than they were initially.

He thought that perhaps it started with his formation of hröar. Having a physical form, after all, was not so much a necessity when most beings around him didn’t have physical forms themselves. His ëalar, at the time, was sufficient for the tasks meted out for him; both in battle and in craft. It was easy to Make with it...easy to Sing and easy to command.

When Ilúvatar created the Híni Ilúvataro, however, it was not sufficient in order for him to interact with them. Orcs, after all, were created from the Children and he needed a means to lure them. Melkor, too, needed form then, though he had far less need to be physical in shape and so none of his hröa were ever-so-detailed as Mairon’s. The elves tended to bend to him merely because he was a Vala, and that was all that was needed.

_**’Thou shalt bringeth me the spawn of Eru, and from them we shall create a wondrous kingdom.’** _

It was not exactly what he’d pictured in his mind. Mairon was not obsessed with aesthetic but he was obsessed with function and orcs were not a picture of function in a sense of singularity. In time...however, that reticence bled into appreciation, and from appreciation, bloodlust.

Orcs were disposable, and because they were twisted in shape and form he felt little guilt over their deaths. Many forms he took then...all of them both beautiful and terrible. Melkor praised him and he told himself that he could live on that praise forever. That, however, was after Utumno fell. In the times before its fall, he had only one hröa, and it was enough. It was enough for him, and he had no cause to look for more.

And it would have been enough, if Melkor was not given to excess and experimentation.

The first time he noticed that things between them were not as they were was in the throne room after a day of working in the forges. Mairon had donned a hröa-one of many-that was common for him to display before their subjects. It was apricot-haired intermingled with marigold, beautiful like the Children but with a harder, crueller set to the brows...slim and supple and ringed with a faint glow. Melkor himself had a tall, raven-haired hröa with a strong jaw and eyes the color of the Silmarils. These, of course, were not present at the time but the contrast was still prevalent. Mairon could acknowledge that he was beautiful without any other hidden comparables.

Then, Melkor touched his hand.

This was not so unusual. When they were amongst their subjects they often touched in order to direct one another’s attention to whatever they desired to discuss. What _was_ unusual was that the touch lingered. Specifically, it lingered so that Melkor took Mairon’s hand and covered it with his own. Their thrones were directly aside one another with no space between, and the shared arm in the middle was wide enough that they could both rest their elbows comfortably without worry of bumping one another. Then, Melkor turned Mairon’s hand flat and threaded their fingers together in a slow...stroking...fingers over wrist and up the palm movement.

There, it was held.

There, _just there_ , and despite all of his discipline and practice Mairon felt his breath catch and their connected skin felt aflame and he did not know what to do. It was clearly his hröa reacting, or at least at first that was what he’d thought. In time, however, as the touch lingered he became aware that it was also a longing in his spirit. He did not know what the gesture meant save that he dared not reject it.

And more than that...he did not really want to. It was not a couplish gesture, nor a gesture intended for the means of comfort and he could feel Melkor analyzing his reaction even as he sat with his thoughts spinning and the echoing...the empty hall below suddenly seeming too small and too cloistered a space. It did not last long; perhaps minutes, but it was enough to leave him unbalanced and he disliked it. When his hand was released he left as soon as he felt it was proper, and Melkor’s amusement was a wingbeat of dark mirth at the back of his mind.

It went on like that.

How long, he wasn’t entirely sure, but the touches increased in frequency and he did not reject them because there was a part of him that _thrilled_ to it. Sometimes it was as simple as a hand guiding his over a tactical map...other times it was an arm over his shoulder. Each time it happened he felt less uncertain of it, more curious about it...but he knew better than to question it. He knew, of course, of physical pleasure and what it entailed. Or, at least, what it entailed for the birds of the sky and the animals of the land in those times. It was an odd dance, perhaps a morphology of a concept of song but he had at the time told himself that it was base; meant for that which was physical but not metaphysical. It wasn’t until Melkor cornered him in a bedchamber they normally reserved for the fledgling vampire project they’d started that it all came to a head.

 _ **”Thou can pretend it an experiment”**_ Melkor had purred even as he was walked into a stone wall.

“An experiment?” he’d said flatly even as he leaned in to chase the touch, as the wicked smile in the Vala’s eyes grew brighter. Pressing him up against a tapestry...the symbol of Utumno emblazoned in black and red against his back, Melkor met him in the middle.

 _ **“Do not deign to pretend thou lack eagerness.”**_ When Mairon made to make a face, the fingers that stroked over his lips were half substance and half not. _**“It is _writ_ in thy visage.”**_

Perhaps it was.

He couldn’t say for certain; nor could he say who kissed who first only that Melkor’s mouth against his was a _bloom_ of his essence. Instinctively, his ëalar rose to respond to the external stimuli...found its way forward and out and _through_ and for a moment he forgot completely that he had a body with vitality to maintain, so great was his distraction.

Only when Melkor’s ëalar sharply yanked at his in an indicative gesture did he recall that he needed to breathe, only then did he take a sharp, gasping breath as that mouth found him again...as a tongue pushed between his teeth and the _world_ spiraled into fluid movement, into a rushing groaning effluvium.

It was perfection.

Greater than perfection, if there could ever be such a thing. When he began to respond in earnest, when Melkor grasped his hips and drew them upwards to fit to his and began to kiss him hard, _hard_ and full and open-mouthed the thrumming, entirely-alien noise that burst from his throat was the hiss of steam beneath the earth.

It startled him but Melkor swallowed it down- _devoured_ -it and decorum- _decorum??_ -decorum was negligible to plunging his fingers into the dark fall of midnight hair...like grasping the inky blackness of the Void, like silk under his fingertips and the growl that followed sent a jagged, aching lightning bolt straight to his groin.

He did not know he was _allowed_ to do this before, but now that he knew he could he wanted _more_ of it. More of the feel of fabric shifting between bodies, of stiff leather and cloth beneath his fingertips as the mouth turning him inside out left his to close over the skin just shy of his jaw...forward from his ear and _suck_ and- _yes_ -Mairon’s teeth nearly sank through his tongue, his hips jolted upwards even as a large-palmed, long-fingered hand found the clasps in his robes and parted them. It sank through and there was a clutch against his waist-skin on skin-dipping down to the hollow of his hips and pressing in-

He arched.

He made another noise he did not know.

It was a push forward, a stretch of vertebrae and his mouth hung lax and slow and stupid. It was _good_ and he did not-could not-could not _think_ beyond the shock of it. It was a fixation on that initial sensation of touch; an obsession and he could not get _enough_ of it. Unconsciously, he writhed into it and the laugh that left Melkor was beautifully dark and heady.

The rest of it was a congealed and glorious blur.

Melkor undressed him, slowly. He took his time pulling each and every garment from his heated flesh. By the time he was finished Mairon was shaking-though not with cold-and his movement towards the bed seemed a slow, stumbling thing in comparison to his Lord’s movements. He sprawled onto it, _crawled_ , perhaps, dipped low and turned to observe Melkor as he solidified fully, apparently choosing to forgo clothes in favor of nakedness.

_**”Beautiful..”** _

In their shared ëalar he could feel Melkor’s appreciation for the hröa he had chosen. Supple, slim-figured and fey-faced; he should not have taken such an indulgent pride in his choice but he did. So, too, was Melkor a pillar of strength; from the stubborn pride in his jaw to the hardened muscles of his chest. These, Mairon traced with his fingertips when he could not bear to refrain from touching anymore.

Indeed, he sat up only to pull Melkor towards the bed...to trace the entirety of him with his fingertips until he was pulled into another kiss; until the kiss was drawn out and flush and the body above him was lain heavy and _full_ against his own. It was touch he was unaccustomed to; moresoe because it was tender.

In later years, he had often wondered if he remembered it so vividly because it was tender.

Tender in the way Melkor took his time; finding each dip and valley and the way he responded to it. For eons, the memory of the lurid burn in those eyes as he fondled him...light-touched then sure, strong strokes that brought garbled noises to his lips, those memories haunted him.

A tongue sliding against his bollocks.

A swipe at the rutch of pinkness below before it delved deep; jaw open wide to take as much of him as he could.

Those memories lingered.

To another, it might not have meant so much. Even as a finger doused in oil swirled in a circulent motion to coax him soft and lax and ready, as a mouth latched hot and heavy to the skin of his inner thigh as he was parted and speared on articulate phalanges...he thought that perhaps _that_ was his undoing. He heard himself groan, felt his loins full near to bursting even as a second finger joined the first; two, three four and the _glory_ of that hidden, golden foci inside of him was a burst of pleasure thick and heady.

Melkor loved him, in the manner the Children would call _’proper’_ , only once.

Only once did the fullness of those fingers being replaced with the girth of Melkor’s length feel like something deeply shared. Only once did the whine that spilled from his lips feel a thing limitless and uncontained, a singing pleasure as a deep voice groaned its appreciation into the shell of his ear. Only once was he wrapped...limb over limb, in a shimmering cocoon of thrumming ecstasy. Forever and but a second it seemed to last, the involuntarily, swollen clench of him against driving hardness, the nudging of a nose beneath his ear as it slurred endearments both into the canal and into his soul.

He was undone at the pinnacle.

At the peak of his pleasure his hröa and ëalar were a thing combined. Moreso were they combined with Melkor’s and he could _feel_ the Vala’s ecstasy as much as he could feel his own. As he both attempted to arch and curl in on himself, as the shout that burst from his lips was a thing of adulation, surprise, and ecstasy he could also feel Melkor’s _fear_. Even though he quickly followed Mairon into oblivion...even though he curled into him as he spent himself within...he could feel it. And when the haze of pleasure waned somewhat he could feel his uncertainty...but that was quickly quashed in favor of the haste of departure.

Departure itself became a frequent commodity.

In times to come it was less tender and more base. There were moments, of course, of gentleness. Usually when Mairon was angry at Melkor and he didn’t want to talk about it. The concept of being pleasured out of a discussion that likely would have helped him more than the pleasure would didn’t escape him. In different...fantastical forms they performed, over and over, in a semblance of love...and each time Mairon’s spirit soared while Melkor’s remained myopic and somewhat distant. He was aware, at one point, that most would not tolerate such coldness for long.

_”Thou art aware of your value...Bright One.”_

But he, too, was selfish.

_The tip of a nail dragging down his side; razor-sharp, parting flesh; a forked tongue lapping up the spill that followed as he groaned excess into heavy fur oer coverlets. Hips jerking, eyes blind and unseeing as he was parted again- _parted inside_ -and the rough of pelt was sticky with congealed- _his, Melkor’s_ -blood and the the growl that ripped through him made the foundations shake...and so they should._

_**”Beautiful One…”** _

Names...he had so _many_ names and only one of them had ever truly felt fitting. It became a thing of carnage...eventually. Eventually he could hardly tell the difference between the bed and the battlefield and Melkor was ever-insatiable and ever-curious and he both _loved_ and _hated_ it. He didn’t allow himself, in the thick of it, to consider what it was doing to him or what it would cost him.

There was a fortress to run, after all, and they stole what quiet moments they could. There was no time to linger on endearments...or so he told himself. The quiet moments...or perhaps moment-so short was it-when Mairon’s hröa was open, spent and shaking with completion, when his ëalar was a humming, curled and spirling thread in the vast spiritual chamber of Melkor’s own...those were the moments he both feared and loved the most.

When there were not-fingers curling in his semi-self..when the grate of teeth and unctuous release became more nip and fluid sigh, he felt too much _home_. It was a golden, warm chalice filled with sparkling effervescence; a circulation of metaphysical and physical bliss that was as frightening a careen into oblivion as the pain of being gutted and left to spill...ruby-red and steam-glistening on the rotting freeze of a battlefield.

Towards the end of Utumno...it was no different.

No different, yet not the same...not the same. The same it was, in the way Mairon’s spirit felt effused with languor, the hiccoughing; almost air-swallowed haze that was desire and that forbidden word he had locked away...in a box tighter than the seals guarding Eru Illuvatar from the carnage he had created and then-as far as the Maia was concerned-abandoned.

Different in the way he could see now that while it was a gesture to him it was a vague and pleasurable interest to Melkor. In the way the hand that smeared his release onto his skin...in darkened...sticky fingerprints was a curiosity of mitigated viscosity; of the afterglow of the glut of pleasure and not much else. Or perhaps something else...but Melkor would never allow himself to feel it.

During one such a time, he had thought...momentarily, of the forest in his mind. In a floating, thought _less_ gesture he had pushed the image from himself and into their intertwined ëalar and he felt Melkor pause. It was a jarring, stuttering halting movement and-in his desperation-he had only thrown the image forth harder...combined it with another of them standing beneath flaming boughs with nothing but silence, nothing but a _world_ unto themselves.

Melkor snuffed it like a candle.

Really, he crushed it. In a single metaphysical gesture the landscape before him dissipated, fragmented into nothing but a cold reminder of what they were doing and the body behind him slid from the bed, left an empty-warm spot in the sheets while the stain of blood and release seemed to cool ever-rapidly on Mairon’s skin.

**_”Thou should not paint thyself a picture that can never be.”_ **

Shivering, humiliated and coming down from what felt like _years_ of illusion, Mairon did not move but gritted his teeth and closed his eyes.

“Why can it never be?”

The answer to that never came, but the words that came next cut to the quick.

_**”Beloved, clearly thou art suffering a mortal affliction not meant for thy kind.’Tis understandable, in thy state of illness, that thou wouldst blame me.”** _

And so, he was made not only lovesick and abhorrent, but also mad.

It was easy, he found...in times after, for Melkor to dismiss him as mad and lesser...because then he did not have to gaze inwards.

He was still dying.

Vaguely, he was aware that they had crossed over what passed as Utumno’s portocullis. It was more of a familiarity with the atmosphere of the area and the sounds of battle dying off than from a sense of sight. It was hard...in that moment...to care about decorum. They had been fighting for days, perhaps weeks. The Siege was never ending and they both knew...intrinsically, that they were overcome.

 _“I did not care what thou were’t”_ Mairon whispered brokenly...inside...from his ëalar, delirious with pain. _“I did not care what thy form was or what thee came from.”_ There was a sharp _***crack**_ as he was dragged over flagstones, as his hröa was further broken...further twisted and mangled and his ëalar began to shine through splitting skin and marrow. _“I love thee. I love thee inside… **I see thee.”**_ He reached up into the blackness and it shied away from him in a growling cloud of eyes and teeth. _**”Here.”**_

 ** _”Mairon”_** the great Voice rumbled...in its dulcet tones...in its velvet inky blackness. **_”There is no place for thy love in Our purpose.”_**

He knew that already.

He was going blind.

Mairon considered the fact that he had, perhaps, always been blind.

Somewhere inside, something physical burst and the taste that flooded from his mouth was awash with copper and things he did not care to name. It splattered onto the flagstones and he could feel the heaving groan of his hröa only vaguely. It was not-pain. He had liked this one, he thought a bit indignantly; he’d taken time with it, it was beautiful and fair-faced but hard as adamantine.

_**”Thou can maketh another...Bright One.”** _

Down, down, down...and the sense of imminent finality only grew greater. They had reached the smithy, he acknowledged. He knew what would come next.

Melkor threw him into the forge.

Into the forge he was thrown, and he burst forth from himself in a shower of fire and scarlet. Briefly ‘he’ screamed, his hröa screamed but then he was Away and up into shadowed battlements, curling about the moulding in a weaving, winding foci that at once mourned the loss and rejoiced in the temporary freedom. A wraith made in flame and that-which-was-Melkor hummed something deep and low...slow and soothing until he settled before Him; come-down and wrought wide and he could not think.

“D’ost thou see me?” he hissed, in bubbling magma, in the ring of metal and steel.

Not-hands cupped his essence….threaded through it even as the blazing silver of empty eyes searched him, all of him...and yet none of him. And he understood that Melkor could love him, or perhaps could love him strangely but not in the same way. It was not completion, but perhaps deletion. Melkor would not be happy until he had erased himself, until he had formed of himself a mirror-like facsimile of his own Being in Mairon.

 _’And what of me?!’_ he wanted to rail. _’Did you look at me and see my devotion or did you just see a cup you could **empty** and fill with yourself?! Do you see my pain?! Or do you just see an **object** , a tool?!_

**_”I see thee”_ **

He did not.

And yet still Mairon stayed. Melkor was taken, Utumno was overthrown and the black tide of what they had wrought was smothered in the brightness of the Valar...if only for a time.

Still he stayed, and he told himself _he_ was selfish. Still...he remained, and still he loved...until there was no more of him.

Mairon loved until the remnants of Song in his soul were a burnt and tattered thing...hanging from a flag that would never fly white with surrender. And because he could not surrender, he took down something else and laid it before the Great Black Throne in Angband when Melkor returned.

He gave over himself.

* * *

_“I will never bend to you, thief."_

Hundreds upon hundreds of years later, Tyelpe’s voice was a backdrop to the coagulant drip of blood on flagstones. Mairon’s head jerked spasmodically at the sound-he was not entirely aware the wretch was still capable of talking-and he felt his teeth bar in a spasm of near-feelingless derision.

_”I loved you.”_

Somewhere...far in the recesses of his mind swirled the recollection of a fiery forest. It was marred then, with the trees burned to ash and a rank...howling wind scoured through every branch. It rotted like Mirkwood, burned like Feanor and the Lamps were a shattered, world-destroying carnage in the tapestry of his recollection. Through it all was the burn of silver eyes...of an all-consuming, universe-obliterating blackness that called him _’Bright One’._

_”I love thee…”_

“Tyelpë” he heard himself growl even as he turned to grasp the pale column of a throat...as his grip tightened until the nails sunk into flesh and sinew, ‘till red welled betwixt his fingertips and the light...the light went out from those eyes and some broken...shattered part of his ëalar wailed as the action echoed in its repetitiveness...into eternity. He thought that some part of him thought those eyes beautiful...once. “Love is _**weakness**_.”

The hand that had come up to grasp at him, clumsily, desperately, like a child would do, fell limp and hung lifeless against the wall. There was a rattling, almost relieved huff and he _felt_ Celebrimbor’s spirit leave him...felt it retreat to the Halls like a gentle, glimmering river.

_”There is no room for love in Our purpose.”_

**Author's Note:**

>  **A/N:** This has been your Silmarillion Smorgasbord in six courses and three pairings. 
> 
> I’m not sure what happened to this one. I was trying to find a way to make them floof but it went _‘Oof’_. I’m going to take the rest of the month off.  
> *if there are errors [I'm sure there are, despite me googling the screen forever], feel free to let me know. Otherwise I will notice them eventually and be properly mortified before correcting them. 
> 
> I'd say thanks for reading but this is just yikes.  
>  _"It's not much of a tale, but I'm sort of attached to it."_  
>  I'll stop lol.  
> Thanks for suffering?


End file.
